A mandatory one year of service by young people to the country would be one way to begin healing a bitterly divided country, the New York Times Editorial Board suggests. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” etc.
“On the surface, the idea would seem to be attractive across the political spectrum — the idealism to liberals, the service to conservatives, the virtues of selfless sharing to millions of Americans who already perform some form of community service,” the Board explains. Service at an early age could be “an introduction to the responsibilities of citizenship, a communion with different layers of society and people of different backgrounds, a taste of different life paths.” Perhaps there would be tuition credits involved like the G.I. Bill, etc.
The Board is talking high concept here and is light on detail. But what is important is establishing a norm:
With America’s democracy threatened by a political and ideological chasm that seems to widen by the day, with dialogue rendered almost futile on fundamental issues such as racial justice, the environment, a battered economy and America’s role in the world, the debate over national service is really a debate over how we move forward.
And what about that? Before getting to ways we might heal the rifts and instill a sense that we are all in this centuries-old political experiment together, the Board acknowledges our libertarian brethren might have other ideas:
To libertarians, talk of government-mandated service smacks of more government imposition on individual liberties, possibly even a violation of the 13th Amendment’s proscription against “involuntary servitude.” Some conservatives argue that national service would be, in effect, government-paid and government-managed social activism, displacing private and faith-based charity. Coerced service is not service, they argue. The rich would get the desirable jobs, while the poor would be stuck with the bad ones. The cost would outweigh the benefits to society.
Perhaps. But the health of private and faith-based charities is hardly the real concern either for conservatives or for libertarians (and there is a great deal of crossover). Charity itself is abhorrent to the Randian ideal of liberty as the freedom to sink or swim on one’s own efforts unaided. One is free to aid someone else, but unless it benefits the person doing the giving, self-sacrifice is vice. Freedom has become an idol without a corresponding graven image. Responsibility is an imposition. Greed is good.
It is that brain toxin as much as any other societal ill that national service between high school and college might help quell. Indoctrination in “the real world” and the real United States prior to college rather than after several years of social theory or before plunging into skills training.
In arguing for national service nearly a decade ago, E.J. Dionne reminded readers that while the Declaration’s “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” trips off the tongue, mutually pledging “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor” gets left in the dust.
“We are sharply divided over the very meaning of our founding documents,” Dionne explains, “and we are more likely to invoke the word ‘we’ in the context of ‘us versus them’ than in the more capacious sense that includes every single American.”
Dionne wrote:
Who knows whether the universal expectation of service would change the country as much as [retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley] McChrystal hopes. But we have precious few institutions reminding us to join the Founders in pledging something to each other. We could begin by debating this proposal in a way that frees us from the poisonous assumption that even an idea involving service to others must be part of some hidden political agenda. The agenda here is entirely open. It’s based on the belief that certain unalienable rights entail certain unavoidable responsibilities.
Yet consumer capitalism and the pressures of making one’s way condition us to deploy with all haste that cherished liberty (won by others) in pursuit of money to make and stuff to buy. For ourselves. We’ll (grudgingly) pay association fees, but taxes for the upkeep of the country? Taxes are theft.
Widespread support for President Biden’s infrastructure proposal suggests that that spell might be breaking at long last. (Broken axles and tires blown on the nation’s decaying roadways might be helping.) A spell of self has taken hold in late-stage capitalism at the expense of e pluribus unum. A period of national service might be one way to shore up the republic, hasten the spell’s demise, and ensure it does not return soon.